Quotes on Language

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

Architecture, like dance, is also a language - one that everybody understands.

Silence is ever speaking; it is the perennial flow of language.

You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren't true. They're useless. But that's not the way we work.

I didn't really know how to make a film when I made 'Control'. I had to create my own language, just as I did when I started taking photographs. I never studied either one.

The thing that makes me want to write a piece of music is having something to talk about, you know? Something I want to get across. Because I'm a composer, music is my first language, and that's what I reach for when I want to convey something.

After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

Violence is the language of the unheard.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

I've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.

There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

I'm no linguist, but I have been told that in the Russian language, there isn't even a word for freedom.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.

A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.